The skyship's departure left a silence that the northern forest swallowed whole. Lian stood motionless for a long minute, letting the cold seep through her worn desert robes, forcing her body to accept its new reality. She was alive. She was alone. And she was already freezing.
The pines around her were monsters, their trunks wider than her entire dwelling back in the Expanse, their branches heavy with snow that never melted. The ground beneath was a treacherous quilt of frozen moss, hidden roots, and rocks slick with black ice. Every step was a negotiation with gravity.
She moved. Staying still was death.
Her first priority was warmth. The sun, pale and distant here, offered no comfort. She found a shallow overhang of rock, a granite brow looking out over a frozen stream, and set to work. Her scavenger's kit held flint, a small blade, and a roll of treated cloth. No wood in sight—everything was wet with frost or buried. She gathered low-hanging pine needles, the driest she could find, and the papery bark of a fallen birch. It took an hour of frozen fingers and failing sparks before a thin, reluctant flame caught.
The fire was pathetic, but it was life. She fed it slowly, learning the rhythm of the northern fuel. As darkness fell—a swift, absolute plummet into night—she huddled against the rock, the fire a fragile shield between her and the vast, creaking cold.
Sleep came in fragments, broken by the distant howl of wolves and the closer, more terrifying sound of silence—moments when the forest simply stopped breathing, as if something massive was passing through.
Dawn revealed the true scale of her task. The mountains loomed above her, not as a distant postcard, but as an immediate, crushing presence. Somewhere in those white peaks was the Frostfall domain. Somewhere in that domain was the "Frozen Heart." She had no map, no guide, no cultivation. Just a direction: up.
The second day taught her humility. She found a game trail, followed it, and walked directly into the territory of a snow-beast—a shaggy, bear-like creature the size of a wagon, with tusks of ice and eyes that held a dim, ancient malice. It didn't see her as prey, but as an irritant. It charged.
Lian ran. Not in panic, but in a calculated, desperate sprint back the way she came, her scavenger's mind noting the beast's gait, its turning radius, the way its weight slowed it on the icy downhill. She survived by being a smaller, more agile target. The beast gave up at the edge of its unseen territory, huffing a cloud of steam and returning to its frozen vigil.
She collapsed in the snow, gasping, and realized she had lost her pack in the flight. Her fire-starting kit. Her remaining food. Gone.
Despair was a luxury she couldn't afford. She forced herself up, backtracked carefully (the beast might change its mind), and found the pack tangled in a low bush a half-mile back. She sat in the snow and laughed, a thin, hysterical sound. Then she got up and kept walking.
On the third day, she encountered the first sign of human presence beyond her own footprints: a spirit-shrine at a fork in the trail. It was a simple cairn of stones, draped with faded prayer flags, with a small, ice-encrusted bowl for offerings. Someone had left a handful of frozen berries and a carved wooden token. The locals, whoever they were, still respected the old ways.
Lian approached cautiously. Her "itch" flared—not a warning, but a recognition. The shrine was built on a minor spiritual fracture, a place where the mountain's energy flowed close to the surface. The offerings weren't just tradition; they were a payment, a acknowledgment of the power in the ground.
She had nothing to offer, but she needed to learn. She placed a single, smooth stone from her pocket—a desert river rock, a piece of her own world—into the bowl. It felt wrong and right at the same time. Then she closed her eyes and let her sense expand, feeling the fracture's pulse.
Images flickered: Not a coherent vision, but impressions. A line of torch-bearing figures moving through the pass. A child's laughter, long faded. And beneath it all, a deep, resonant hum that felt like the echo of her data-core's warning—but older, more patient. The mountain knew something about the "Silence." It had felt its approach long before the star-vessel crashed.
She opened her eyes, shaken. The shrine was just stones again. But she now had a faint, directional pull—not toward the peak, but along a specific fork in the trail. A path that felt… watched. Known.
She chose it.
The fourth day brought a change in the terrain. The forest thinned, replaced by open, wind-scoured slopes of bare rock and treacherous snow bridges. She learned to test every step with a long stick, to read the subtle signs of hidden crevasses. The cold was a constant, gnawing presence, but her body was adapting, growing harder.
She also learned she was being followed.
It wasn't a beast. It was too patient, too silent. A shadow that moved at the edge of her vision, always gone when she turned. A flicker of movement in the rocks above. Her "itch" was no help—whatever it was, it gave off no spiritual fracture, no wrongness. It was simply there.
On the fifth night, as she sheltered in a shallow ice cave, the shadow spoke.
"You walk the old path with desert stones in your pocket. The mountain wonders at your purpose."
Lian didn't move. Her knife was in her hand before the voice finished, but she kept it hidden. "The mountain can ask me itself."
A soft sound—perhaps a laugh. A figure detached itself from the darkness at the cave mouth. It was a woman, ancient beyond counting, wrapped in furs and feathers, her face a map of wrinkles and frost-burn. In her hand, a staff carved with images of wolves and falling stars.
"I am the mountain's tongue, child. The shrine told me of your offering. A river stone from a land of heat. A strange currency." The old woman's eyes, black and bright, studied her. "You seek the Frozen Heart."
It wasn't a question. Lian didn't bother denying it. "I carry a warning."
"We all carry warnings. The mountain has been warning for centuries. No one listens." The old woman—a shaman, a hermit, a ghost of the old north—hobbled closer, her staff tapping a slow rhythm. "But you carry something else. A scar of the sky. A piece of the star-fall's secret. I taste it on you. The Silence's echo."
Lian's blood chilled colder than the ice. "You know about the Silence?"
"I know that the mountain knows. It remembers the first time the sky cracked and something listened. It remembers the frost-lord who fought back and the door he sealed with his own soul." The shaman's eyes narrowed. "I also know that door is open again. And that the ones who opened it now walk the Weald, carrying a power that is both answer and invitation."
She knew about Kaelan. About Elara. The old woman was connected to something vast, something that watched the land's deep currents.
"The boy with the burnt core and the woman with the foreign mind," the shaman continued. "They will emerge soon. The Weald is done with them. And when they do, they will need shelter. Guidance. A place to rest before the next storm." She pointed her staff at Lian. "You will provide it."
"Why me?"
"Because you walked the old path with a desert stone. Because you heard the Silence's echo and did not break. Because the mountain has watched you survive, and survival is the only currency it respects." The shaman turned, preparing to vanish back into the dark. "Follow this trail two days more. You will find a hunter's lodge at the tree line, abandoned but sound. Wait there. They will come. Tell them the mountain sent you. Tell them… the grandmother remembers."
Lian opened her mouth to ask more, but the old woman was gone, swallowed by the night as if she had never been. Only the faint, rhythmic tap of her staff fading into the wind proved she was real.
For two more days, Lian walked. The cold tried to kill her. A rockslide nearly took her. She ran out of food and ate frozen lichen scraped from stone. But she walked.
On the evening of the second day, she found the lodge. A sturdy, single-room structure of ancient, dark timber, half-buried in snow but intact. A stone hearth. A stack of dry wood left by some previous occupant. A view of the tree line and the edge of the Weald beyond.
She built a fire, the first true warmth she'd felt in days, and sat in the flickering light, waiting. The grandmother's words echoed: They will come.
She didn't know them. She didn't know if they were saviors or the very danger she'd been sent to stop. But she had walked through ice and death to reach this point. She would wait.
And in the dark forest at the edge of the Weald, two figures stumbled out of the impossible trees, leaning on each other, their forms silhouetted against the distant glow of the lodge's fire.
The glacier did not groan. It whispered.
Lian had learned to distinguish the mountain's voices over her days of solitary trekking. The deep, settling cracks of shifting ice were the mountain's bones adjusting. The whistle of wind across frozen ridges was its breath. But this sound—a thin, persistent hum beneath her feet—was something else. It was the mountain remembering.
Her "itch" had been a constant companion since the shrine, a low-grade throb that guided her through the white labyrinth. But here, on the vast, windswept belly of the Frostfang Glacier, it became a scream. Not of warning, but of recognition. Something ahead was deeply, spiritually wrong in a way that resonated with the scar in her own mind.
She pressed on, her scavenger's instincts screaming at her to turn back, her curiosity—that old, damnable engine—pushing her forward. The sun, a pale coin in the perpetual twilight of the northern day, offered no warmth, only a ghostly illumination that made the ice cliffs glow from within.
Then she saw it: a dark smudge against the blinding white, half-buried in a drift where the glacier's slow march had deposited its debris. At first, she thought it was a rock outcrop. But as she drew closer, the shape resolved into something far more deliberate.
It was a body.
Frozen, yes, but not in the twisted, random posture of an avalanche victim. This was a man seated against a spine of ice, his back straight, his hands folded in his lap in a formal meditation pose. He wore the remnants of fine robes, the fabric bleached and brittle but the cut unmistakably of the northern nobility—frost-woven silk, now stiff as armor. His face, preserved by the dry, deep cold, was a study in anguish. Not the agony of death, but the profound, soul-deep terror of something witnessed in the final moments.
In his lap, clutched in frozen fingers, was a leather-bound journal, its pages sealed in a perfect block of clear ice that had formed around his hands like a second skin.
Lian's heart hammered against her ribs. The "itch" was a deafening roar now, centered on that book, on that body. This was no random victim. This was a message, preserved for decades, waiting for someone who could hear.
She knelt, her breath fogging in the still air. The ice around the journal was thick but brittle. Using her knife, she worked slowly, patiently, chipping away at the frozen seal without damaging the leather beneath. It took an hour, her fingers numbing and re-numbing as she worked.
Finally, the journal came free. The leather was cold, stiff, but intact. She opened it carefully, the pages crackling with the release of centuries of pressure.
The script was elegant, precise—the handwriting of a scholar, not a warrior. The first entries were dry, administrative: dates, locations, measurements of spiritual energy at various points along the glacier. The archivist's name was Soren, and he had been sent by the Frostfall Elders to investigate a "persistent spiritual anomaly" in the high peaks. A routine mission.
Then the entries changed.
"Day 17. The anomaly is not a fracture. It is a voice. Faint, but unmistakable. It does not speak in words, but in... questions. It asked me why I was afraid of the dark. I am not afraid of the dark. I am a cultivator of the Frostfall line. But last night, I lit three candles before sleeping. For the first time in decades."
"Day 23. I have located the source. A cave beneath the ice, sealed by an ancient collapse. The voice is louder there. It knows my name. It knew my mother's name. It offered to tell me how she truly died. I refused. I am not a fool. But tonight, I dreamed of her. She was smiling. She said the cold was not an enemy. She said I should listen."
"Day 31. I opened the cave. I should not have. The voice is not one voice. It is a choir of them, singing a song that has no melody, only the spaces between notes. It showed me things. The fall of the star. The arrival of the strangers from the sky. The creation of the door my ancestors sealed. It told me the door is not closed. It is waiting. For a key. For a mind that can hold its song without breaking."
"Day 34. I am not returning. I cannot. The voice is in me now. Not as an invader, but as a... guest. It asks permission. It is so polite. It tells me I am special, chosen. It tells me the Frostfall line has always been its intended instrument. The boy with the frozen heart. The girl from nowhere. They will come. They will complete the song. And I will be here, waiting, to give them the final note."
The final entry, written in a shaking, desperate hand, was barely legible:
"It is not a wound. It is a MOUTH. And it has been whispering since before our ancestors walked this land. I cannot destroy the journal. It will not let me. But I can leave it. I can leave a warning. If you read this—if you are the one it spoke of—RUN. Do not come here. Do not let it complete the song. The boy and the girl are not saviors. They are the final instruments. And once the choir has its full orchestra, the Silence will be all that remains."
The page ended. Lian's hands were shaking. The body before her, the archivist Soren, had not died of cold or starvation. He had died of revelation. His mind had simply... stopped, overwhelmed by the truth it had been forced to hold.
As she stared at his frozen face, his eyes snapped open.
Lian recoiled, scrambling backward in the snow, her knife flashing out. But the body did not move. The eyes—pale, crystalline, lit from within by a faint, ghostly light—simply stared at her. And then, a voice spoke, not from the frozen lips, but directly into her mind.
*"You read my warning. And yet you are still here. The mountain's stubborn child." *
It was Soren's voice, but stretched thin, worn by decades of solitary death. A spiritual echo, triggered by the removal of the journal, trapped in the ice by the very voice he had tried to warn against.
"Are you... a ghost?" Lian's voice was steadier than she felt.
*"Less than a ghost. A recording. A scream frozen in time. The Choir let me keep this much, as a kindness, or a cruelty. I am not sure which." * The frozen eyes moved, tracking her with an eerie slowness. *"You carry its echo too. The star-fall's scar. You heard the Silence and did not shatter. That is why you are here. That is why you found me." *
"I'm looking for the Frozen Heart. The boy the voice spoke of. And the Foreign Mind. I need to warn them."
*"Warn them? Or deliver them?" * The echo's voice held a bitter, ancient sadness. *"The Choir does not make mistakes, child. If you are here, if you read my words, it is because it wanted you to. You are not a messenger. You are a component, just as they are. The question is: which song will you choose to sing?" *
The ground beneath her feet trembled. A deep, resonant crack echoed from somewhere within the glacier—the sound of ancient ice shifting, of pressure building. The echo's eyes flared brighter.
*"It is waking. It felt you touch my prison. It is curious. You must go. Now. But first—take this." *
A surge of psychic force, not hostile but desperate, slammed into Lian's mind. For a blinding instant, she saw what Soren had seen: the cave beneath the ice, filled not with rock, but with the hull of the star-vessel, twisted and half-melted but still humming with a faint, recognizable frequency. It was the physical source of the anomaly, the mouth itself. And hidden within its wreckage, a single, glowing shard—not of data, but of metal, pulsating with the same rhythm as the void-shard Elara carried, but older, purer, more dangerous.
The vision vanished. The echo's light dimmed.
*"The hull fragment. It can hear the true song, not the Choir's corruption. If you reach it before they do, before the convergence, you may have a choice. If not..." *
The frozen eyes went dark. The body was just a body again, a husk abandoned by its final message.
Lian didn't wait. She ran, scrambling across the glacier, following the imprint of the vision—the location of the cave, burned into her memory. Behind her, the mountain groaned louder, a deep, bass note of awakening. The Choir, or whatever fragment of it lived here, knew she had taken the warning. It would not let her leave easily.
She had minutes, maybe less, to find the cave, to claim the fragment, before the ice itself rose against her. And somewhere beyond the glacier, beyond the Weald, two figures were stumbling toward a convergence she now understood was not an accident, but a composition.
The question Soren's echo asked echoed in her skull, louder than the mountain's rage:
Which song will you choose to sing?